


if tomorrow never comes

by RedRoci



Series: by the roads we walk [2]
Category: Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:28:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22793272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedRoci/pseuds/RedRoci
Summary: She watched her world end twice: nuclear fire and icy loss. Time to learn to live again.
Series: by the roads we walk [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1641445
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

_Come on, come on, come on_ . The mechanism that opens the pods is slow, so slow, and she’s so cold, but all she can think is _please, don’t be dead, come on, goddammit OPEN_ . And it does, and there he is, cold and covered in blood and very definitively dead. She chokes back a sob at the sight of him, realizing now just how hard she’d been willing the whole thing to be a bad dream. It isn’t a dream. Her Nate, who’d always seemed so indestructible, who’d come home from Anchorage with just a handful of new scars and old nightmares when so many of his friends hadn’t come home at all. Nate, who’d been terrified down to his bones of fatherhood, who told her plainly that they should name the boy after her father and not his, because he’d tried so hard to cut that old man out of himself and he didn’t want any part of him tainting their son. _Their son._ He’d stared down in wonder when the nurse had placed the boy in his arms, and been a different man ever since. The pain and panic she’d swallowed finally claw their way out of her throat and she screams in anguish. Her family, gone while she watched, _taken_ . She has to get out. There’s nothing she can do for Nate now but re-seal the pod until she can come back and bury him. She takes the wedding ring from his finger and, with some effort, the dog tags around his neck, then hits the button on the panel to close the pod. _I’ll find him_ , she promises silently, her fingers pressed to the glass. 

For the first time, she takes a moment to look around. All the other pods are still closed and sealed, with a readout on each panel: OCCUPIED; NO LIFE SIGNS. Everyone else who’d made it into the vault, their friends and neighbors, all dead? The panic threatens to surface again and she pushes it down hard. It won’t do to fall apart now, she promised Nate she’d find Shaun, and that is what she is going to do. She shivers. The blue jumpsuit she’d been given was too thin to protect from the chill in the air, never mind the leftover cold from having just stepped out of a freezer herself. _Where is everyone?_ The tinny announcement that has been playing this whole time, the one she’s been ignoring, resolves itself into words: _Systems failure: all life support systems: offline._ She’s not sure if that refers to the cryo units or the whole vault, either way it’s bad news. 

There’s a skeleton in the cafeteria. The room is a wreck, like there was a riot, and there is a skeleton. On the floor. Wearing the ragged remnants of a vault security officer’s uniform, no weapon in evidence. It’s not the only one. As she makes her way through the vault, the only sound is water dripping and the systems failure warning crackling through the speakers. She becomes more and more certain there’s no one left alive in the vault but her, a fact which is borne out by the log in the overseer’s terminal. They’d starved to death waiting for an all clear that never came. There’s a pistol on the desk, and another skeleton in the chair, and she’s pretty sure if she looks there’ll be an extra hole in the skull. She doesn’t look. She does take the pistol though, and the box of ammunition next to it. If all the wildlife out there had taken the radiation the same way the roaches had, she was going to need it. She pauses a moment before entering the command to open the door. There’s no way to know what’s out there. The vault, inexplicably, doesn’t seem to have any equipment for external readings. But there _must_ be people outside. They took her son somewhere. They came from _somewhere_. 

  
  


He’s been watching Sanctuary for days. It’s quiet, out of the way of most caravan routes, apparently abandoned but for a lone Mr. Handy puttering about, stuck in a 200 year old cycle of domestic chores. If it weren’t for the vault on the hill above, it’d be an ideal place for a safehouse on the Railroad’s route out of the Commonwealth. It might be worth the risk. 200 years and change, and as far as he has been able to tell, Vault 111 has been sealed that whole time. He’s heard rumors, seen evidence of Vault-Tec’s experiments, some of the _really_ weird stuff they got up to back in the day. One wonders who they thought was going to be around to analyze the resulting data. Deacon shrugs to himself, drawing the sign for ally where he’d been sitting and stashing some clean water for whoever ended up out here to keep tabs on the place next. They need the safehouse, and the vault’s been sealed this long, so odds are it’ll stay-- The thought breaks off as, incredibly, an alarm begins to sound below. He hears the pressure release as the seal cracks, and the steel vault door descends into the dark. He drops into a crouch and watches in stunned silence as the vault door reappears, a single figure standing on it, shading their eyes against the midafternoon sun. A woman, he realizes, as her head snaps to the right, toward the Glowing Sea. Even at this distance, he can see when she starts to shake. The pistol in her left hand clatters to the ground as she falls to her knees, wrapping her arms around her torso. A full minute passes, then, like she’d been counting the seconds, her shoulders stop shaking and she stands, holsters the dropped pistol, straightens her spine and takes off down the hill toward Sanctuary. That settles that, then. There’s still people in this Vault, Sanctuary is off the table. Back to square one on safehouse locations for the northern route. 

  
  


The last time she saw this view, the world was burning. Looking at it again, she can see that was a long time ago. A long time. She can see the shattered wreck of the Boston skyline on the horizon, but all around her she can see nature working to reclaim what’s left of the world. Military vehicles and construction trucks abandoned and gone to rust, the fence that had surrounded the vault entrance hardly more than a memory. More skeletons out here, though much less intact than the ones she’d passed in the vault. Her hands start to shake and she knows she’s in shock. She doesn’t have time for this, but she gives herself a minute. Sixty seconds to feel it, then she has to move on, has to find Shaun. She barely hears the pistol hit the ground when she drops it. Deep breaths. Time to move on. There’ll be time to mourn later, for Nate, for the life she’d known, for the world. Later. She heads towards home with no real idea as to why, but there’s no trail to follow to find Shaun from here, and she has to start somewhere. 

  
  


“ _200 years?_ ”

“Well, a bit over 210, in fact.”

She’d known it had been a long time when she saw the first skeleton. But two hundred years? She can’t help it, she starts to laugh. Codsworth, in so much as a Mr. Handy can have an expression, looks uncomfortable. It’s really not funny, she knows, and tries to rein in the hysteria, but... _two hundred years_. Codsworth is babbling something about dinner, but pauses, hesitates.

“Pardon me mum, but...where is Master Nathaniel? And young Shaun?”

That does it. The hysterical laughter stops like he’d thrown cold water over her. “They killed him. Someone killed Nate and took Shaun. I have to find them, Codsworth.” 

“Oh...oh dear, Miss Grace...These things you’re saying…”

“Focus, Codsworth. Have you seen anyone? Has anyone been through here lately?”

“No, mum. But...you might try asking in Concord, perhaps they’ve seen something?”

Concord it is. Before she goes, she searches through the house to find something warmer to wear. She wonders if she’ll ever be warm again.


	2. Interlude: East of the Mojave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Courier walks east.

After everything the Legion had put them through, Elena would have thought it’d feel better. This was the last of them, or near enough to so it didn’t matter. Between the two of them, and increased NCR patrols nearer to Vegas, the Legion was set to be a fading memory. Lanius was bleeding out into the dust at her feet. They had no command structure, no supply lines, no direction. What was left of them had either fallen to her and Boone’s guns, or scattered to the four winds, abandoning their red uniforms and Latin vocabulary in the hopes of passing unnoticed. More and more the rumors of slavers they’d been following had led to garden variety raiders. Not that that saved them, of course. Slavers were scum either way, so best be rid of them, Legion or not. She’d thought it would feel better. Judging by the expression on Boone’s face, he’d thought the same thing, and was just as disappointed. 

“What now?” he asked. He sat down in the dirt, back up against a tree. She stepped over Lanius and sat down next to him. 

“Don’t know. Didn’t really have a plan, past seeing the Legion to the gates of hell.” Boone grinned at that, a cold, humorless thing that didn’t stay on his face more than a moment. “Reckon we could go back to Vegas. Or…” she trailed off, thinking. 

“Or?” he prompted after a minute. 

“We could keep goin’ east. I got nothin’ tying me to the west. Never been further east than Austin. Maybe we keep hunting slavers on the way out there. Maybe do some good, I guess.”

Boone took his sunglasses off to look at her. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d seen his eyes. She met his gaze with a shrug. After a moment of searching her face, he shrugged back. “One slaver’s as bad as another, I reckon.”


	3. Chapter 3

The jacket is Nate’s. So is the backpack. The house --the neighborhood, really-- had been abandoned, but not ransacked, for the most part. Still, 200 years is a long time. Nate’s winter clothes had been packed away in the basement still, which is probably why they survived. Nothing of hers was still usable. Well, not _nothing_. Her pistol and the suppressor that went with it had been in the safe still, untouched and intact, only needing a little oil. It’s in better shape than the one she’d taken from the overseer’s desk, and familiar. 

There are indeed people in Concord. What Codsworth had failed to mention was how very unfriendly the people now occupying Concord are. The dog who’s been following her since she passed the Red Rocket seemed to know they were hostile before she did, stopped one of them killing her by ripping his throat out. So, just walking up and asking people for directions isn’t necessarily the best approach anymore. Fine. Solving problems with violence never led _anywhere_ awful, right? She keeps to the shadows, and soon realizes that the angry people seem to be besieging the museum in the middle of town. Now, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is not always (or even often) true, but it’s worth giving it a shot. She shoots two of them in the back, and a laser from the balcony above takes out the last one.

“There’s more raiders inside! Please, we need help! Grab that laser musket.” _Laser...musket?_ There, on the steps of the museum, in the hand of a dead man. This one isn’t dressed like the others --raiders, the man had said-- but that doesn’t mean much. Grace takes the gun from his hands, but she’s skeptical about relying on an unfamiliar weapon taken off a recently dead man. Didn’t do _him_ much good, did it. She slings it over her shoulder anyway, just in case. 

She’s never been in this museum. Nate’s opinion on it had alternated between “tourist trap” and “font of propaganda and revisionist history,” so it wasn’t on their list of things to see when they’d moved to the Boston area. More raiders in here, like the man on the balcony had said. Not too many, though, and soon enough she is at the barricaded door.

“Name’s Preston Garvey, Commonwealth Minutemen. Sure am glad to see you, I wasn’t sure how much longer we could hold them off.” Of the 5 people in the room off the balcony, exactly _one_ of them is armed: this Preston Garvey. No wonder he’s worried. _Minutemen?_

“Happy to help,” is what she says out loud, though, no point in being rude to potential allies. “Grace McHale.”

“Now there’s something you don’t hear too often,” Preston says with a chuckle. “Think you could lend a hand a little while longer? Those raiders followed us from Lexington.” His smile fades. He looks decades older without it. “We have a plan, but we’re gonna need a little more help, if you can spare it.”

“Sure, let’s hear it,” she says. 

“Well, here’s the thing.” One of the unarmed folks, a man in overalls and welding goggles, speaks up from behind Preston. “Looks like back in the day somebody landed a vertibird on the roof of this here museum. _And_ , whoever it was, they left behind a suit of cherry T-51 power armor. Only problem is: the battery’s dead.”

“So what is it you need me for?”

“It needs a new fusion core to power it. Lucky for us, there’s one down in the basement, we just couldn’t get to it before.”

Preston cuts in. “So if you can get the FC, you can take the power armor and pull the minigun off the vertibird. Rip right through the rest of the raiders.”

Grace looks from one man to the other, unsure. “I can get the battery,” she says, slowly. “But this plan probably shouldn’t hinge on me being able to use the T-51. I’m...not at all familiar with the system.” Nate had trained on the T-51 once, for about a week early in his career. He’d ended up in light infantry, not heavy, so he hadn’t used it since then. She never had; it wasn’t the kind of thing people in her line of work used. Too noisy. She knew its weak points, and the best way to sabotage it, but not how to actually function in it. “I’ll get you the battery, but one of you should probably use the thing.”

“What do you think, Sturges?” Preston looks at the man in the goggles. 

“Sure, I reckon between the three of us we could probably figure out how to work it,” he says, a little sheepishly. 

“...So, nobody here is trained on it, then?”

“That’s about the size of it, yeah.”

“Right. Ok. You two go take a look at it, then, while I go down and grab that battery. Won’t take a minute.” _What have I got myself into_. 

Getting the battery really is easy. Locks have never been a problem, and this particular one is child’s play. After some discussion, Preston ends up being the one to put the power armor on. It’s configured for someone at least six inches taller than Grace, and resizing it would take time and equipment they just don’t have. Fortunately maneuvering it turns out to be fairly intuitive. She can hear Preston giggling like a child as he tears the minigun from its housing on the vertibird, and smiles. It doesn’t last long. The raiders are back, and there are more of them this time. She rests the barrel of Preston’s rifle on the edge of the roof and takes aim.

Ok. OK. That’s never a bloody _dragon_ coming up from the sewers. She nearly falls off the roof at the sound it makes. On the bright side, it’s tearing the raiders apart like so much tissue paper. Preston is yelling incoherently, but his aim is still good. Can’t tell if the dragon-thing even feels it, though. It’s getting closer, and she’s not as accurate with Preston’s gun as with her own. Pushing down the panic, she sets the laser rifle aside, draws her pistol, and puts 4 rounds through the thing’s eye. To her intense relief, it drops like a stone. Sturges and Preston both cheer. The raiders are all dead at this point, so it seems to be over. The group is reconvening in the lobby of the museum, Grace joins them to return Preston’s rifle. Maybe now she can ask about Shaun. 

“Thanks for your help out there. Damn, that deathclaw...I don’t know what we’d have done without you. Here, it’s not much, but it’s the least we can do.” Preston hands her a handful of bottle caps.

“Uh. Yeah, no problem. Like I said, happy to help.” She pockets the bottle caps, unsure what they’re for but unwilling to betray her confusion. “Listen, I was wondering if you could help me-”

“Woman out of time...you’re looking for your son.” A chill washes over Grace at the old woman’s words, that inescapable cold. 

“ _What did you just say?_ ” Her voice is sharper than intended, and Preston looks slightly alarmed, but he doesn’t seem to be surprised at what the old woman had said.

“Got the sight, kid. Saw you, in a vault. Frozen. Woke up in a world not your own, lookin’ to save your boy.”

“What. Do you know. About my son.” She’s shaking again. 

“Oh, honey, that’s all I got. But you don’t need the sight to know where to go next, kid. Diamond City. Somebody there’ll have the answers you’re lookin’ for.” 

Grace takes a deep breath, trying to regain control of her nerves, of this situation. Of her runaway heartbeat. “I don’t know where that is.”

“South-east of here a ways, near the center of the old city,” Preston tells her. “Wouldn’t try the trip this late in the day though, you won’t make it before dark. You could come with us, if you wanted,” he adds, a hopeful edge to his voice. “We’re headed to a place Mama Murphy knows about, place called Sanctuary. It’s not far from here.” _Sanctuary_. Sanctuary Hills, most likely. It’s safe enough, and he’s not wrong about it being too late to try to walk to downtown Boston. Especially with things like that “deathclaw” wandering about. And maybe he can provide some context to Mama Murphy’s “Sight” along the way. Grace never really believed in ESP or anything like that. As far as she was concerned, fortune tellers were just scammers with a good eye for psychology and body language. But this woman… How could she have known about the vault, about Shaun? “Woman out of time,” she’d said. How could she know that? Belatedly Grace remembers the vault suit she’s wearing...but that only explains part of it. She needs to know more. 

“Sure, you’re probably right. Too late to go hiking cross country anyway.”


End file.
